AWS i7i.24xlargevsAWS i7i.2xlarge

i7i.24xlarge pairs 96 vCPUs with 768GB of RAM at $9.0605/hr On-Demand (about $6524/mo at 24×7). i7i.2xlarge pairs 8 vCPUs with 64GB at $0.7550/hr (~$544/mo). i7i.2xlarge is 92% cheaper per hour than i7i.24xlarge ($8.3055/hr gap).

Because both instances are in the **i7i family**, the only thing that changes between them is sizing — same silicon, same architecture (Intel Xeon (x86_64)), same burstable/sustained behavior. The choice is purely about how much capacity you actually need: i7i.24xlarge gives you 96 vCPUs and 768GB of RAM, i7i.2xlarge gives you 8 vCPUs and 64GB. AWS scales pricing close to linearly within a family, so picking the right size is mostly about right-sizing your workload, not getting a better deal per vCPU.

On raw price-per-performance, the two are i7i.2xlarge delivers ~1133% more single-thread Sysbench score per dollar (371 vs 4575 points per $1/hr). That's the cleanest signal we have for "which one runs your workload faster per dollar," but it only matters if your workload is single-thread-bound; for parallel workloads the multi-core scores (135850 vs 14180) are what to weigh. Spot pricing flips many of these comparisons — when i7i.24xlarge drops to $2.6620/hr and i7i.2xlarge drops to $0.2616/hr, the cheap-per-hour winner can swing meaningfully.

In practice, pick i7i.24xlarge when your workload is closer to storage-optimized (NVMe SSD) (I/O-bound work needing low-latency NVMe local storage — NoSQL, search). Pick i7i.2xlarge when it's closer to storage-optimized (NVMe SSD) (I/O-bound work needing low-latency NVMe local storage — NoSQL, search). When neither side is obviously right, the cheaper hourly rate usually wins for fault-tolerant batch workloads, while the higher single-core score usually wins for latency-sensitive web traffic. The regional pricing tables linked from each instance page below show where each is currently cheapest — sometimes a >20% regional gap flips the comparison entirely.